Myanmar Is Restoring Temples to Rebuild its Heritage

New York Times, 11 May 2017: The NYT has a ground level look at Myanmar’s bid to put Bagan on the World Heritage List. While I suspect that we, readers from the outside, think that the World Heritage listing is a good thing for the ruins and the country, the article is more ambivalent about what this current push means.

“World Heritage? No one cares about that,” Ms. Soe Moe Thue said as she stood under an umbrella in a light drizzle recently. “We just need to survive.”

Bagan’s monument complex is a crown jewel in a tourism sector that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and has grown rapidly since Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country, began a rocky transition toward democracy in 2011.